brrt to the future

Hi hackers! Today the MoarVM JIT project is nearly 9 years old. I was inspired by Jonathan's presentation reflecting on the development of MoarVM, to do the same for the MoarVM JIT, for which I have been responsible. For those who are unfamiliar, what is commonly understood as 'JIT compilation' for virtual machines is performed by two components in MoarVM. A framework for runtime type specialization (' spesh ') A native code generation backend for the specialized code (the 'JIT'). This post refers only to the native code generation backend component. It, too, is split into two mostly-independent systems: A backend that emits code directly from MoarVM instructions from machine code templates (the 'lego' JIT compiler). Another backend that transforms MoarVM instructions into an expression-based intermediate representation and compiles machine code based on that (the 'expression' compiler). Things that worked well Using DynASM for code generat...

Many years back, Larry Wall shared his thesis on the nature of scripting. Since recently even Java gained 'script' support I thought it would be fitting to revisit the topic, and hopefully relevant to the perl and raku language community. The weakness of Larry's treatment (which, to be fair to the author, I think is more intended to be enlightening than to be complete) is the contrast of scripting with programming . This contrast does not permit a clear separation because scripts are programs . That is to say, no matter how long or short, scripts are written commands for a machine to execute, and I think that's a pretty decent definition of a program in general. A more useful contrast - and, I think, the intended one - is between scripts and other sorts of programs , because that allows us to compare scripting (writing scripts) with 'programming' (writing non-script programs). And to do that we need to know what other sorts of programs there are. The short...